THE SEVEN WONDERS OF THE WORLD

CIVILIZATION

LESSON 1.We will try to define the notion “civilization” and to establish its essential features.

1. What associations does the word “civilization” give rise to?

2. What features of civilization does Kenneth Clark point out in the programme “Civilization” (The Skin of Our Teeth)? Account for their importance.

3. Read the given pieces of information and offer your own definition of CIVILIZATIONtaking into account the features mentioned in task 2:

· A civilized society is the one which worked out a solution to the problems of living in a relatively permanent community at a level of technological and social development above that of the hunting band, the pastoral tribe, with a capacity for storing information in the form of written documents.

· Civilization is something artificial and man-made, the results of making tools of increasing complexity in response to the enlarging concepts of the community life.

· Civilization means bringing out of barbarism, enlightenment, refinement and education.

• Civilizationisan advanced state of human society, in which a high level of culture, science and government has been reached.

• The terms civilization and culture are used as essential synonyms of sometimes varying accent. There is no difference of principle between the two words, they denote somewhat distinguishable grades of degree of the same thing. Civilization currently carries an overtone of high development of a society; culture has become the customary term of universal denotation in this range, applicable alike to high or low products and heritages of societies. Every human society has its culture, complex or simple.

By the late 18^th century there was a clear awareness of savages, barbarians and civilized people as the three stages in man’s social and cultural evolution.

4.Render the following extract from “The Skin of our Teeth” into good Russian:

The history of civilization isn’t the history of art – far from it. Great works of art can be produced in barbarous societies – in fact the very narrowness of primitive society gives their ornamental art a peculiar concentration and vitality. At some time in the ninth century one could have looked down the Seine and seen the prow of a Viking ship coming up the river. Looked at today in the British Museum it is a powerful work of art; but to the mother of a family trying to settle down in her little hut, it would have seemed less agreeable – as menacing to her civilization as the periscope of a nuclear submarine.

An even more extreme example is an African mask. Most people, nowadays, would find it more moving than the head of the Apollo of the Belvedere. Yet for four hundred years after it was discovered the Apollo was the most admirable piece of sculpture in the world. It was Napoleon’s greatest boast to have looted it from Vatican. Whatever its merits as a work of art, I don’t think there is any doubt that the Apollo embodies a higher state of civilization than the mask. They both represent spirits, messengers from another world – that is to say, from a world of our own imagining. To the Negro imagination it is a world of fear and darkness, ready to inflict horrible punishment for the smallest infringement of a taboo. To the Hellenistic imagination it is a world of light and confidence, in which the gods are like ourselves, only more beautiful, and descent to earth in order to teach men reason and the laws of harmony.

There was plenty of superstition and cruelty in the Graeco-Roman world. But, all the same, the contrast between these images means something. It means that at certain epochs man has felt conscious of something about himself – body and spirit – which was outside the day-to-day struggle for existence and the night-to-night struggle with fear; he has felt the need to develop these qualities of thought and feeling so that they might approach as nearly as possible to an ideal of perfection – reason, justice, physical beauty, all of them in equilibrium. He has managed to satisfy this need in various ways – through myths, through dance and song, through systems of philosophy and through the order that he has imposed on the visible world. The children of his imagination are also the expressions of an ideal.

5.When and where did civilization begin? Which of the “wonders of the ancient world” is associated with this region?

THE SEVEN WONDERS OF THE WORLD

1. Read the given paragraph and identify its structure(the mode of thought: narration, description, exposition, argumentation or urging; the thesis, the general logical structure.)

The fact is that there are hundreds of miracles on the Earth, and perhaps a reasonably travelled person could now name at least fifty wonders comparable to the original seven, even without escaping from the confines accepted as belonging to the ancient world. There must have been just as many ancient times, contemporaneous with the reign of Alexander the Great, when such lists were first compiled. And therefore, the question is why there were only seven wonders listed in the first place? The answer is comparatively simple, if somewhat foreign to our understanding. It lies in the fact that the number was itself a holy number. We have inherited a seven-day week - because, according to the ancients, there are seven planets, and because these were governed by seven angelic beings, seven gods, and seven evil demons. There were seven deadly sins, and seven great virtues. When the late medieval magicians wrote their tracts on numbers, they always gave precedence to the number seven, to the "holy" number, for within its compass were said to lie the secrets of the universe, to a point where it was believed that any man who could piece together the mysteries of seven and three would attain all human knowledge! This is why there were seven wonders listed in the ancient world - not because there were only seven great marvels!

2. a) When giving a lecture on the subject, one is supposed to provide pauses. Similarly, a paragraph is not only a logical construction, but also a compositional device, regulating the rhythm of the discourse.

Where would you make pauses if that speech were yours? How would you break it into smaller paragraphs for consideration of compositions? Reproduce it.

b) Give a one-sentence summary of the above paragraph, reflecting its LOGICAL structure.

4. Watch the film “The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World”. Describe one of the Seven Wonders of the World trying to explain why it was nominated as one.

v The Pyramids.

v The Hanging Gardens in Babylon.

v The Statue of Zeus in Olympia.

v The Temple of Artemis in Ephesus.

v The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus.

v The Colossus at Rhodes.

v The Lighthouse at Alexandria.

5.What does the new list of the seven wonders (contemporary wonders) of the world consist of?

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 1027